Entries tagged with intersection

"There's not much historical data about Victorian-era sex-workers, you know," said the librarian who'd just returned from the back office.

"I'm amazed you could find anything at all," the young man replied. An eight-by-ten-inch paperback flopped onto the counter in front of him, and he frowned at the title. "Folklore and Legends on the Eve of the Edwardian?"

She nodded.

"Are you sure you have the right Mary Lewis?"

"She's the aunt of Martin Lewis, the father of your grandmother."

He pointed at the book. "All that is in here."

"I was able to cross-reference all of the genealogical information you provided with the woman in this particular tale." She picked up the book and flipped it to the table of contents. "Page 106: 'The Water Nymph of Tower Bridge.'"

"You're kidding me."

She shook her head. "Why don't you have a read?"

That's how he came to be in London, standing under the Tower Bridge at dusk. He wrote a name on a slip of paper, rolled it into a tiny glass bottle, threw it as far as he could into the water, called out the name, and waited. The next day, he wrote the same name on a slip of paper, rolled it into a bottle, threw it, called out, and waited. On the third day, after the name was called out once more, a silhouette rose from the river without a sound.

"I have never been summoned before," the shadow said. "Why have you done this?"

"I have a question for you, Prudence," he told her.

"Perhaps you could accompany me into the water, and I will provide all the answers you need."

"Why don't you come out here?"

"If it pleases you." As the woman emerged onto the banks, he noted with disappointment that she didn't have a tail, just legs. However, because he was focused on something more precious to him than her nudity, he didn't see glistening scales dissolved into skin with every step she took.

"Do you remember a woman named Mary Lewis?"

"No," she replied.

"According to her, you met over a hundred years ago."

"That is a very long time ago," she said. "And I have been introduced to a great many people."

"She was standing on this spot, shortly after this bridge was built."

"Ah, yes. I do recall meeting someone then. She called herself a 'lady of the night.'" Prudence cocked her head with curiosity. "And what is your interest in Mary Lewis?"

"She's my great-great-great-aunt," he explained. "When I found out she had an encounter with a water nymph, I did some research. According to some legends, you are the spirits of dead prostitutes--"

"I assure you," she spat, "I have never sold my body to anyone!" Her anger then drifted away. "A fate such as mine is reserved for those who have stolen the love of another. Many of that profession are guilty of this."

"That brings me to my question," he said. "Is she with you now?"

After considering this for a few moments, she asked, "Would you like me to take you to her?"

A tiny smile grew on her face as she moved toward him. "How can you resist me, standing naked before you?"

He backed away. "Is she with you or not?"

"I have not encountered her," she replied. "How is it she died?"

"She threw herself off of this bridge."

"Then she is not," she said. "To swim with us, one must die at the hand of another."

His shoulders fell with a sigh.

"Why is it so very important that Mary Lewis be immortal?"

"This may seem weird to you," he started, but he stopped and chuckled. "I'm telling a mermaid that something might be weird.

"Anyway, the more I learn about her, the more I can feel her loneliness and despair. I've been almost..." He hesitated, searching for the proper word; "... possessed with this desire to console her."

"I see," she said. "And would this consolation be for her sake, or for yours?"

He didn't react.

She held out her hand. "I can give you all the comfort you seek if you just follow me."

"Prudence, don't."

"I've yet to meet a man who can dismiss me as you do. What makes you special?" She leaned in closely to read his eyes. She concluded, "You are one of us."

"I thought you said you weren't a prostitute," he replied. "You were pretty adamant about it."

"You take the love of men from their betrothed."

He snorted. "My johns are senators, ambassadors, businessmen, ministers; they don't love me. They just want to do something filthy to a boy."

"You smell of love," she told him.

"It's not good enough."

"I know."

He waited before asking, "Will I become one of you?"

"You cannot," she replied. "And you should not wish it. Like you, I've stolen the warmth of countless men, yet I am still cold. Unlike you, I will be cold forever."

Hope then fled him, taking with it the facade of strength he had been wearing for most of his life. He fell to his knees.

A tear tumbled down her cheek and over her lip. "You can do something I cannot," she told him. "You can vanquish this solitude."

"How?" he croaked.

"You could follow your ancestor," she said. "You could fall from this very bridge and die, as anonymous meat and bone. Or you could take my hand, and you will fall asleep in the arms of love, and you will never again be alone."

"We better get down there," he said. "People will start to miss us and get suspicious."

She giggled and told him, "Speaking of suspicious, I forgot to call and say good night to my kids."

"I wouldn't worry about them. What are you going to tell your husband?" he asked.

After a few seconds and a sigh, she finally said, "I'll worry about that later. Mind if I join you in the shower?"

Underneath the bed, Frank Nacht rolled his eyes and gritted his teeth to hold back a roar of frustration. He mouthed, "You just said you were going back down there!"

Her feet swung onto the carpet and stayed there for a few moments so she could balance herself. Nacht reluctantly had to sympathize with her wobbliness; that was one hell of an orgasm she'd just had. He craned his neck to watch her go, because, hey, naked woman. When her partner followed, he averted his eyes, because, hey, naked man. After much more giggling, the shower began to run. He waited twenty seconds before rolling out from the bed and rushing to the laptop on a nearby desk.

Immediately upon his opening it, Skype logged on with its telltale electronic whoosh blaring through the speakers. Nacht stabbed the mute button until it shut up. He then clicked the appropriate icon, and filling the screen was the logo of independent weapons contractor, Allen Vanguard.

"Jesus on a pogo stick!" Nacht groaned quietly. "Nobody told me I'd have to log in!" He took a deep breath and thought back to the "Hacking 101" seminar he'd been required to take during basic training. On the first day, Professor Babbage handed out a memo featuring the four most used passwords: love, sex, secret, and god. Nacht ruled those out immediately, because Babbage was a cock.

It was a good thing Nacht had memorized every detail in the Allen Vanguard man's folder. He tapped in his mother's maiden name.

"Incorrect login," the laptop replied. "Two more tries."

It couldn't possibly be his wife's maiden name or birthday, because he clearly didn't think a lot about her when he wasn't home. He tried the name of the man's first pet: "Bandit." It was a very detailed folder.

"Incorrect login," the laptop replied. "One more try."

A loud moan echoed out of the bathroom. "You got stamina, I'll give you that," Nacht whispered. To the computer, he said, "If this works, I'm going to punch that guy in the face." He typed in "password."

All of Allen Vanguard's secrets scrolled out before him. With a grin, he pulled out a thumb drive and looked for a place to plug it in. There was none--not on the front, not either of the sides, nor in the back.

The shower stopped pouring.

"Fuck," he grunted, "this." Nacht left the room with the folded-up laptop under his arm. In no time at all, he found himself on the fourteenth floor of the hotel, slipping a keycard into his lock.

"You have got to be kidding me!" he shouted as soon as he could see into the room.

A woman squealed, and he slammed the door.

"Okay, now what?" He couldn't hang out in the hallway; people might get suspicious of a kid in a turtleneck, leather gloves, and a fanny pack at an arms expo in Abu Dhabi. He ducked into the emergency stairwell and took a seat. "You have nobody to blame for this but yourself, Frank," he reminded himself. "You didn't have to take that apprenticeship. There were tons of other career options there."

The door to the fire escape slammed open behind him. He didn't even have to look up to know this would be bad. "Translator," he said. "I would have made a great translator."

The two men brandishing matching Hawaiian shirts and silenced pistols said nothing.

"Let me guess:" Nacht sighed; "MILF." Despite the fact that MILF, which stood for Moro Islamic Liberation Front, was a pretty threatening organization, he had to choke back a giggle.

"You will give us the Hawk Protection computer!" demanded the meanest-looking one.

"Uh," Nacht replied, "this one is Allen Vanguard."

The mean one held up a finger; you didn't need a translator to tell you that this meant, "Hold on a moment." To his partner, he said in Farsi, "Don't we already have the Vanguard data?"

"We have a man on the inside, so I'm guessing yes."

"Shoot this guy anyway?"

"Of course."

"I would have made a great analyst," Nacht mumbled.

Suddenly, a man in a tuxedo swung down from the railing of the flight above them. "Going down?" he asked as he grabbed the mean one and tossed him over the edge.

While that one screamed for the duration of his fourteen-story plunge, his partner raised his gun, only to drop it when his windpipe was crushed by a well-timed karate chop. "And you, my friend," the tuxedo man purred, "are a pain in the neck."

The MILF soldier gurgled to death, and Nacht took a deep breath and leaned against the closest wall.

Vince Cazzone, superspy, told him with a breezy grin, "You almost blew my cover out there, Francis, old chap."

"That wasn't the only thing of yours getting blown," Nacht replied.

"Undercover work," Cazzone said with a grin. "Well, it would have been undercover in a minute if you hadn't interrupted."

He handed over the laptop. "Here's your goddamned MacGuffin."

"You hold onto that. I hear there's baccarat downstairs."

"Baccarat?" Nacht asked. "At an arms show?"

"All the gros legumes will be there."

"'Big vegetables'? Seriously?"

"You have a lot to learn about the lingo out in the field, old boy." He straightened out his jacket and smoothed out his hair. "Loads of important intel slips out at these under-the-table gatherings. Besides, I love baccarat."

Nacht shrugged. "I'll run upstairs, change into something less conspicuous, and join you."

"Nonsense, dear boy," Cazzone told him. "You're not on the guest list. Why don't you go to back to the room and order up some room service. I can send up a lady-in-waiting if you like."

"Come on, Al," David replied, "you know I can't stand it when you call me Dave."

"Medium rare's the best I can do," Al said. "Besides, you ordered it just plain medium last week."

"That was last week."

"I don't get you, Dave." Al turned back to the kitchen. "Burger, medium rare, heavy on the rare!"

"I'll take it," David told him. A few minutes later, he sat on a bench in the park, soaking in the sunshine and peeling an anemic tomato off of his lunch.

The moon was waning something fierce, and in a few days it would be full. He didn't need his meticulously updated calendar to know this either. The dramatic part of his condition would kick in then, but before that, his teeth and fingernails would sharpen, making it hard to type. His senses had already sharpened, which is how he heard the air being sliced in half by a flat, round object spinning toward his head.

Unfortunately, his reflexes weren't as sharp as his hearing, and that flat, round object bounced off of the side of his skull and spilled lunch. A growl rumbled from deep inside, and he roared, "What the fuck was that?"

The girl, probably a college student, her glorious breasts straining against a heavily reinforced sports bra, skipped over to him and squealed, "Oh-my-God-I'm-so-sorry-mister!"

He realized as she leaned over to retrieve the Frisbee that his libido had also sharpened. He probably shouldn't stand right now.

She straightened out, shrugged, and blushed. "You want to, maybe, I don't know..." Sheepishly, she showed him the toy in her hand. "... play fetch?"

Right then, the only one thing pissing him off more than her inadvertently mocking his condition was the fact that he really did want to fetch that damned Frisbee. If he had a tail, he would have wagged it. Instead, he gulped and nodded.

"Good boy," she cooed and flung it with a snap of her wrist. Her technique was flawless, but her aim could use a lot of work. As he reflexively gave chase, he watched it clip a tree, sail all the way out of the park, ricochet off of a bus and a minivan, narrowly miss a pedestrian, and disappear down a side street.

"Oh-my-god-I'm-so-sorry!" she squealed.

He trotted after it with a sigh, but as soon as he rounded the corner, his hair stood on end. Something was setting him off, but he couldn't figure out what. Every instinct told him to leave, but that sports bra and the time of the month wouldn't let him. Besides, the midday sun revealed every corner of the block, and it was empty, save for a sedan parked against a nearby curb.

He crouched beside the car and reached beneath it for the lost Frisbee, stopping suddenly when a number of details clicked into place like tumblers in a lock. First off, there was an irregular shadow that didn't belong to the undercarriage. It carried with it the faint scent of vanilla covering up a deeper scent of rotting soil, along with the rustle of something alive without a heartbeat. He stood, backed away, and announced, "If I knew how to hotwire a car, I'd drive it out of here and let you roast."

"No, you wouldn't, puppy."

Closing his eyes, he replied, "What makes you say that, angel face?"

"I think you know what I'm talking about."

He reminded her after a moment, "I had a little too much to drink that night."

"So did I."

"No," he said, "you drank someone who had too much to drink."

"Same thing."

"Not for us regular people."

"Puppy," she said, "when have you ever been 'regular people'?"

"Are you going to tell me what you're doing down there?"

"It's kind of a long story."

"It would have to be." He sat down on the sidewalk with a sigh. "Arianna," he said, "I thought we talked about you and your people coming back to town."

"You really believe you could stop us?" It was an honest question, not a threat.

"I do."

Silence filled the block until she told him, "You know, I wasn't there when it happened."

He replied, "I don't think it makes a difference where you were when my family was murdered."

"Yeah, you do."

He jumped to his feet and dusted his pants off. "Anyway," he growled, "I need to go fuck a coed, so why don't you go ahead and stay here until the sun goes down." Because if he didn't fuck something today, he was going to combust. But he couldn't bring himself to follow through on that--not with Ariana so close by.

A dozen hours later, after he failed to talk himself out of it, David returned to the sedan, muttering, "What are the odds that she's even still here?" Sure enough, a quick sniff and glance under the car revealed that she wasn't. This was both a relief and a disappointment.

Suddenly, she appeared out of nowhere, poked his shoulder, and laughed a low, flirty laugh. "You're it," she told him before slipping back into nowhere.